October 5, 2022 • 45 mins
By the 1980s, tension between the U.S. and Soviet Union was a fact of everyday life. Early '80s American pop culture was quite literally exploding with nuclear doom. But was a real crisis unfolding right under our noses? One dauntless sleuth grows determined to get to the bottom of a decades-old Cold War mystery: Able Archer 83. Produced by FilmNation and Pacific Electric Picture Co. in association with Gilded Audio.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Here.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted
to remind you that my brand new book is coming
out on April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive
Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre
order it right now at snafudashbook dot com. Trust me,
if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.
(00:24):
It's got all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we
just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker.
I am also going on tour to celebrate that's right.
I'm coming to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago,
San Francisco, and my hometown Los Angeles. So if you've
ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q
(00:46):
and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting
turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head
to Snaffo dashbook dot com to pre order the book
and check out all the tour details and day, or
just click the link in the show notes that'll work too.
Did you ever watch a movie as a kid and
(01:07):
convince yourself that it was real that its outlandish premise
could possibly come true. I know I did, and for me,
one of those movies was Wargames.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Great to meet you, Great to meet you too.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I'm ed by the way. Yeah that's Matthew Broadrick. He's
a national treasure and also the star of Wargames, a
movie about an almost accidental nuclear war that I watched
maybe one hundred times as a kid, came out in
nineteen eighty three, and it was Matthew's breakout role.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
The fact that I had gotten the lead of a
you know, studio movie was incredible, Yeah, absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
His character was a hacker, a tech genius. David Lightman
was a moister at computer games, and Matthew was great
in it. I mean, obviously, right, he's an incredible actor.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
But wait, now do I adjust my volume? Can you speak?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
You guys talking talking talking? Say?
Speaker 5 (02:15):
Gee?
Speaker 4 (02:16):
No, nodding because I want to now pretend that it's working. Okay, Yeah,
so it's perfect.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Matthew Broderick is clearly not a tech genius in real life,
but that's just further proof what a great actor he is.
So in War Games, teenage hacker David Leitman tries to
impress a girl at school, Jennifer, played by another eighties icon,
Ali Sheety. Along the way, he accidentally hacks into a
supercomputer that the US is using to game out World
(02:42):
War three scenarios, hence wargamell.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
How about global thermallear.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It gets misinterpreted as a real nuclear attack and almost
starts World War three?
Speaker 6 (02:56):
Launch detiction.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
We have a story launch detction.
Speaker 7 (03:02):
Terrifying.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, I am not charmed by that. I am terrified
by that. When I was nine years old, wargames really
captured my imagination in the sense that I became utterly
convinced it was real. I even had a breakdown at
summer camp because of it. All the other kids were
(03:25):
having a grand old time. Meanwhile, I was just terrified
that at any moment we'd all die in a fiery
nuclear armageddon. Yeah, I guess I was a bit of
a wet blanket while everyone else was just trying to
get pumped up for s'mores. So why am I talking
to Matthew Broderick about wargames? After all, It's just a movie,
(03:47):
an outlandish premise, a fantasy.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Eventually we all grow up and realize that movies aren't real.
There are no accidental nuclear wars. Right, Well, my friends,
imagine my surprise when I learned that the premise of
Wargames was fucking real. Yeah, it came true only months
(04:14):
after the movie's release. That's right. As it turns out,
in nineteen eighty three, a real life military exercise, a wargame,
almost started an actual nuclear war, just like Wargames. This
exercise that almost ended at all. It goes by the
code name Able Archer eighty three, and that's what this
(04:36):
show is about.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Wow, that's an amazing story.
Speaker 7 (04:43):
I I'm surprised.
Speaker 8 (04:44):
I don't know about that, but I don't think I
do know about it.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Too bad they don't give out an oscar for best
nuclear war prediction. The Wargames screenwriters would have been a
shoe in. It's like kind of a perfect screenplay. I
don't think they were too far off. When I first
heard the story of Abel Archer eighty three, let's just
say my childhood fears were instantly validated. Thinking back on
(05:10):
that moment at summer camp, paralyzed by the fear that
the outlandish plot of war Games would come true, camp
counselors hovering around me, trying to console me, saying, come on, dude,
it's just a movie. Let's go canoeing. Everything's gonna be fine. Well,
looking back, I realize now it was not fine. It
was so incredibly not fine. They were wrong and I
(05:32):
was right. I'd just like to say, on behalf of
nine year old me, I fucking told you so? Who
That felt good? But vindication aside, Learning this story still
leaves me a little unnerved, maybe even alarmed, Because if
a military exercise almost caused a nuclear war in nineteen
(05:53):
eighty three and nobody knew about it, what a complete
and utter snaffoo. Snaffoo is a military term first used
by soldiers in World War Two. It's an acronym snaffho.
It stands for situation normal, all fucked up, meaning this
(06:15):
is so fucked up. But then again, isn't it always?
That's what this show is about. The gas, the disasters,
history's greatest screw ups. This season the story of Able
Archer eighty three. It's the ultimate Cold War mystery, a
stew of espionage, paranoia, shady politics, and dangerous miscalculations. Oh
(06:37):
and a lot of mind games. Put on your hazmat suits, listeners,
I'm ed Elmes. Your host and this is Snaffo Able
Archer eighty three.
Speaker 9 (07:08):
It's just this whole game of deception and count deception
of who can you trust?
Speaker 5 (07:13):
Oh wait, he's preparing a sudden.
Speaker 10 (07:16):
I heard a young father saying, I love my little
girls more than anything, and I would rather see my
little girls die now than have them grow up under communism.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Really, for the first time in my life, I felt
like there could be nuclear war.
Speaker 9 (07:32):
It wasn't a question of would it happen, It was
a question of when was it going to happen.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
We were preparing to fight armageddon.
Speaker 9 (07:38):
That's what we're.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Told, That's what we believed.
Speaker 9 (07:41):
We were training to fight the end of the world.
Speaker 6 (07:51):
It was a week just like every other week. Abral
Archer eighty three was not anything out of the ordinary.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
This is Jean Gay. He was a participant in the
nineteen Able Archer wargame. Gene like a lot of men
who participated in Able Archer that year recall it the
same way, which is to say, they don't really recall
much at all.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Nothing to me from that exercise at the time. You know,
jumped out.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
That's Colonel Spike Calendar and he says the same thing Nope,
nothing of note to these men. That week in early
November nineteen eighty three was just a week like any
other week, just another week of standard military exercises, practicing
how to fight the end of the world as one does.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
The whole purpose of able Archer was the emphasis on
the practice of the nuclear weapons release for caizures.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Able Archer was a NATO exercise in November of nineteen
eighty three. The Able Archer players sat in a bunker
in Belgium practicing how if it came to it, they'd
fight a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. It's like
a soccer team doing drills, but instead of training for
a game, they're training for armageddon, which, like a soccer game,
(09:01):
you can't use your hands because they got blown off.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
The whole idea was if you ever had to do it,
you know you didn't want to do it for the
first time.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
When Spike says do it, he's referring to the task
of launching planet destroying weapons. It's an example of how
military professionals are weirdly cavalier when they're talking about their work.
It's kind of shocking how something so gnarly can sound
so routine.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
How do you look at what the requirements truly are,
you know, for those weapons systems and the numbers of them.
So it would be a matter of being counting and
in some respects if you have a Soviet division, what
is the number of weapons that might be required to
reduce the effectiveness of that division to where it was
no longer military capable?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
See what I mean? My point is this, to men
like Gene and Spike, there was nothing exceptional about gaming
out of fictional war during a b large It was routine.
But a few decades later Gene and Spike would learn
that Able Archer eighty three was anything but routine.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
I was in my own little world. I hate to
use the word oblivious, but I've used that word before.
Speaker 6 (10:18):
It was many years later they found out about it,
that anything other than the exercise took place in the
real world situation that occurred at during that time. I
was not aware of that until years afterwards.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, I never heard of anything more about this exercise
until what twenty or twenty five years later.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
What Gene and Spike would come to learn is that
while they were sitting in their bunker back in nineteen
eighty three rehearsing the end of the world missiles to
strike targets in Moscow. How the Soviets were listening, and
they seemed to be convinced it was not a rehearsal
at all. Soviet missile commanders were placed on high a.
Soviet leaders retreated to their bunkers, fingers hovering over the
(11:03):
proverbial big red button, and NATO had no idea.
Speaker 9 (11:11):
I mean, it is a miracle. We did not all die,
Like it's just goofy.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
This is Jeffrey Lewis. He's an expert on nuclear history
and geopolitics, and he finds the whole story of Able Archer,
what he calls the war Scare to be sort of funny.
Speaker 9 (11:28):
Almost all of the war scare is totally self inflicted,
which makes it like really darkly comic.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
I have to agree. There's an old saying that tragedy
plus time equals comedy. Well, if that's true, then a
story about a nuclear near miss plus about forty years
should be fucking hilarious.
Speaker 9 (11:44):
Because if you step back, it sounds crazy, right, It
sounds crazy that we could have had a serious nuclear
crisis that nobody knew about. Like that's nuts.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
It is nuts. Jeffrey because it's not just that able
archer participants like Gene and Spike didn't know that a
newnuclear crisis was unfolding under their noses. No one knew.
Let that sink in for a second. If it's possible
that a nuclear crisis could unfold right under our noses,
that we were in danger without knowing it, does that
(12:15):
mean it's still possible? All right, let's set the stage
a little bit. It's the nineteen eighties. There was certainly
a general and very pervasive anxiety about nuclear weapons. Pretty
Much everywhere you looked, you'd find nuclear paranoia. It wasn't
just wargames. It was all over pop culture. This delightful
(12:38):
little number is ninety nine Loft Balloons by Nina. It's
about one hundred red balloons accidentally inciting a nuclear war.
Kind of heavy for a kitchy pop hit. The nineteen
eighty three Bond film had a nuclear plot. The doctor
Seuss was feeling.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
The heat this bomb on the zekes just as fast
as you can.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Evening chimed in, I love that shit personally, I love
that song, and I just love that Sting threw his
hat right in the middle of an international conflict. Anyway,
when it comes to examples of nuclear anxiety in nineteen
eighty three pop culture, there's actually one that stands above
(13:21):
all the rest. It was just a made for TV movie,
but it became a cultural event and it would actually
play a role in our Cold War mystery.
Speaker 11 (13:32):
It was a movie like no other movie, and it
had a profound impact on New York.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
That's story.
Speaker 11 (13:37):
Next, we'll hear from people who like you watch the
Ultimate Disaster.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Movie the day after, a movie that would scare the
living shit out of America.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
More than seven hundred people packed Riverside Church tonight to
watch the day after.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Many said they came here because they were afraid to
watch it alone.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Everyone, and by everyone, I mean a hundred million people,
almost half the US population at the time, gathered around
their TVs on the evening of November twentieth, nineteen eighty three,
and tuned into ABC to watch it.
Speaker 11 (14:12):
Before the movie begins, I would like to caution parents
about the graphic depiction of nuclear explosions and then devastating
effects in a moment.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
The day after that, gather around kids, time to fill
your innocent little heads with deep, reverberating drama. Past the popcorn.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
I tried to do my part in making people keenly
aware of what the real consequences would be.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
This is Ed Hume, he wrote the day after. The
film is set at the border of Kansas and Missouri.
That's where the US nuclear missile silos are. The main
characters are average townspeople in the American heartland.
Speaker 8 (14:49):
A bunch of people living in the Midwest doing ordinary things.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
At first, the whole nuclear war thing isn't really front
and center. It just kind of lurks in the periphery.
But even as it creeps in, the characters can't accept
their fate.
Speaker 8 (15:02):
What was that. There's one saying where a woman is
so in denial that she's running around making beds as
they know that missiles are being launched.
Speaker 5 (15:12):
Don't bother with the.
Speaker 8 (15:13):
Bed just now, even we've got to get down below. Listen,
those missiles have all gone off.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Oh my gosh, Wow, she really wants to make those beds.
Speaker 8 (15:32):
And then it happens.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It happens, the heartland is evaporated. The rest of the
film is stomach churning. To put it lightly, It showed
what a nuclear war would actually look like. Flashes of light,
lives instantaneously incinerated. But the whole explosion part isn't the
(15:57):
worst of it, because you get to see what happens
the day after nuclear fallout, radiation, poisoning, blistering skin and
dying organs, piles of bodies and rubble, looting, hoarding, and
everyday Americans turning on each other. I mean, all jokes aside,
this is grim fucking stuff.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
The general pabla, they were pardon my language, what they
were scared of shutless.
Speaker 10 (16:23):
I for one, felt that it was just devastating.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Like every horror story you've ever read. Roamed to one story.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
We got a glimpse of what is really at stake
in a nuclear war.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
I just want to go die, went to blast and
not have to live and start all over again.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Oh okay, didn't heed the parental advisory. This is how
that clip makes me feel. Okay. So yeah, in nineteen
eighty three, there was a general sense of nuclear doom. Hell,
it's why I had a mental break down at summer camp.
(17:01):
But we didn't know that there was a specific crisis
to be afraid of. We didn't know that we might
have almost had a nuclear war. During NATO's annual able
archer exercise. So then the question becomes why.
Speaker 11 (17:16):
Not there is and you probably need it. About now,
there is some good news.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
This is Ted Copple from Nightline. He's hosting a live
panel about the day after right after the movie aired.
Speaker 11 (17:29):
If you can take a quick look out the window,
it's all still there.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Wow, deeply reassuring Ted. Anyway, Celebrity scientist Carl Sagan was there,
telling an already nauseous audience that he thought the film's
portrayal of nuclear war was actually not as bad as
it would be if it really happened. Yeh boy. Henry
Kissinger was there too, probably talking about feasting on the
souls of innocent children or something, but before the panel began.
Speaker 11 (17:56):
Joining us live from his home in suburban Washington is
the Secretary of State, mister George Schultz.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Ted Copple brings out US Secretary of State George Schultz,
President Reagan's right hand man. He was a serious man,
loyal to the president, famously bragged about enjoying staring contests
with the Soviets, waiting for them to blink, comforting and so.
Mere minutes after the American public watched this horrifying film,
(18:23):
hearts still in their stomachs. The man who would be
standing next to the button pusher in chief answers the
burning question at the front of every viewer's mind.
Speaker 11 (18:33):
The future as we've just viewed it tonight. Is that
the future as it will be, or only the future
as it may be?
Speaker 7 (18:41):
Neither that is not the future at all. The film
is a vivid and dramatic portrayal of the fact that
nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and
the realization of it has been the policy of the
United States for decades now, the successful policy of the
(19:03):
United States.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
If you watch the clip, George Schultz is shifty as hell.
His eyes keep flickering just to the right of the
camera and then back again, like he's reading Q cards.
He looks scared. Ted Season's journalist that he is smells
a little bullshit, he presses George.
Speaker 11 (19:26):
Mister Schultz, that is the answer of a Secretary of
State to a reporter. And that's fair enough, because that's
what you and I, respectively are. But what would a
George Schultz who is talking to a member of his
family say in response to the same question, same answer, Well,
I would give the same answer.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
I'll tell you why I think George is nervous. It's
because eleven days before this interview able Archer eighty three
could have caused a nuclear war. A man in Schultz's
position would have known about that, right. Surely he was
shitting his slacks for the past eleven days trying to
figure out how such a colossal fuck up could have happened.
(20:03):
Now would be a great time to come clean, to say, yeah,
we're gonna shake things up with our nuclear policy, because
the movie's right, this is scary shit. And yet, after
watching the day after, George Schultz, Secretary of State, assures
the American public that the administration status quo is effective
(20:24):
in preventing nuclear war. In eleven days after a nuclear war.
Speaker 9 (20:29):
Scare, it's a very different kind of crisis because it's
so clumsy.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Here's Jeffrey Lewis again.
Speaker 9 (20:46):
You know, this is more like two drunks in a
bar circling one another. And it's not so much that
anybody would deliberately choose to start the war. It's just
that things would spiral out of control.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
The two drunks here are, of course, the United States
and the Soviet Union their drink bombs. And I'm not
talking Jaeger. Here's the part of the show where I
give you a crash course on the Cold War. Get
out your pencils, kids, Welcome to Arms Race one oh one.
Speaker 11 (21:18):
An ADAM bomb destroys or injures in three ways by blast, heat,
and radioactivity.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
The og atomic bomb was invented by the Americans in
the forties, you know, the one Hiroshima, Nagasaki. It only
took the Soviets five years to figure it out for themselves,
and once they had the bomb too, it began a
decades long race for bigger and better death machines.
Speaker 9 (21:40):
The fun thing about the Cold War is that there
were a huge variety of nuclear weapons and nuclear yields.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Jeffrey and I have very different definitions of fun.
Speaker 9 (21:52):
So pretty soon after the end of World War II,
the United States developed a much more powerful nuclear weapon
than even the sea the destroyers that we saw dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and these were called therma nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
This is the early fifties. A thermonuclear weapon uses the
radiation from the initial blast to ignite an even bigger blast,
a bomb within a bomb. The result is a warhead
that's about the same size as the atom bomb, but
way more destructive, like a million tons of explosive power
instead of ten thousand. In other words, it was economical
(22:27):
a bigger catastrophe for a smaller cost. You can't argue
with savings like that.
Speaker 9 (22:33):
Once the United States, followed by other countries, developed therm
nuclear weapons, there was no limit to how large a
nuclear weapon one could make. The freeze that came to
be used about the amount of nuclear destructive power was
overkill because each side was worried that the other side
would strike them first, so they needed to have backups
and redundancy and more than you needed. And so in
(22:57):
practice what that led to was each side having the
capacity to destroy the other many, many times over, to
make the rubble bounce. In one particular phrase.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Back in the sixties, the US had enough nuclear weapons
to destroy the Soviet Union fifty times over, you know,
just in case some little cockroach escaped the first forty
nine blasts, which set the table quite nicely for this.
Speaker 7 (23:25):
Good evening, my fellow citizens.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
That's John F. Kennedy back in nineteen sixty two telling
the world in a televised speech from the White House
that a nuclear crisis was unfolding in Cuba. US biplanes
had discovered that the Soviet Union was building nuclear missile
sites on the Caribbean island nation, a little too close
to the United States for comfort.
Speaker 7 (23:45):
The purpose of these bases can be none other than
to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
The US Navy set up a blockade, trying to prevent
any Soviet ships from bringing their nukes anywhere near the island.
The Soviet Chips approached the blockade nuclear weapons in tow
It was a full fledged nuclear standoff. The news coverage
of the Cuban missile crisis was impossible to ignore. A
major world event became television drama. For thirteen days, Americans
(24:18):
sat glued to their televisions until finally it was over.
Speaker 11 (24:24):
Under aerial surveillance, the missiles that had threatened the United
States went back where they came from.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Everyone breathed a sigh of Marlborough smoke filled relief. And
did we learn our lesson? Did we scale down operations
at the bomb factory and literally cool our jets? No, No,
my dear listener, of course we didn't. In the late
sixties and seventies, the US would build more weapons. The
(24:51):
Soviets would build a lot more weapons, We'd get rid
of some and then build some more. By the early
nineteen eighties, our nuclear fruit basket contained big nukes, small nukes,
extremely precise nukes.
Speaker 9 (25:03):
And so the question naturally arises, like, why the hell
did we do that? And I think the answer lies
in the fact that we didn't have a better idea.
I'm just going to build as many nuclear weapons as
I can to keep the bad guys away from me.
How am I going to think about it any more
than that? And that's a very powerful, simple idea, wrong
but incredibly powerful. And it's how you end up with
(25:25):
two countries with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed
at each other, ready on a moment's notice to end
civilization as we know it. You know, over who controls Berlin,
which admittedly is a very nice city.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
And that just about sums up that successful nuclear policy
George Schultz was talking about earlier.
Speaker 7 (25:47):
The successful policy of the United States.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Each side made a gamble that if they could just
build enough weapons, their adversary wouldn't dare test them, so
they didn't need diplomacy. They were bound by the contract
of mutually assured destruction. It was a horrific game of
nuclear chicken, and it would lead right to Able Archer
(26:12):
eighty three, which some say is the closest we came
to a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile crisis. But
here's the thing. Able Archer isn't anything like the Cuban
missile crisis. In fact, it's not like most crises we've experienced,
not just because no one knew about it, but because
it was completely unintentional, a mistake. It's not like I
(26:34):
don't know the Vietnam War or Russia's insane invasion of Ukraine. Today,
during Able Archer, two countries with absolutely no desire to
get into a nuclear conflict may have almost started one
in spite of themselves.
Speaker 9 (26:51):
If the Reagan administration nearly sleepwalked into a nuclear war,
that suggests those people shouldn't be let anywhere near positions
of power. And if the intelligence community the fact that
the Reagan administration was sleepwalking toward nuclear war, that suggests
we need different analysts.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
If all that's true, then it makes perfect sense the
Reagan administration would not want to leak a snaffoo this massive,
so the public would never hear about Abel Archer eighty three. Instead,
it would become nothing more than a Cold War rumor,
a myth only whispered about in the back hallways of
the Pentagon. And it might have stayed that way if
(27:28):
it wasn't for Nate Jones.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Walking through.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
This is the vault.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
It really looks like the warehouse at the end of Indiana.
Jones of just boxes, boxes, boxes. Sometimes I used to
come here and just do a little bit of work
because the atmosphere of thousands of boxes looming over and
me helps me work.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
This is Nate Jones, an historian. Actually he's really more
of a sleuth, like a history detective who has dedicated
almost twenty years of his career to you uncovering what
the hell really happened during Able Archer eighty three.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
My desk is overrun with Foyer requests. It looks like
at least ten thousand pages of Foyer requests and responses.
So it's definitely a tree unfriendly business. But the government
works on paper, so we got to work on paper.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
This FOYA that Nate is talking about, like everything in government,
it's an acronym. It stands for the Freedom of Information Act.
And if you can't tell it has dominated his life
for the past decade. For ten years, Nate worked at
the National Security Archive, where he and his colleagues used
the Freedom of Information Act to pry classified information about
(28:40):
able Archer eighty three out of the government's clause. I
like to picture them wrestling with a very stubborn bald eagle.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At one point
in time, Nate was like most people. He didn't know
about Able Archer eighty three until one day in two
thousand and four, a professor of his uttered a few
words that totally changed the course of his life. He said, Hey, Nate,
(29:04):
I heard about this nuclear fuck up in nineteen eighty
three called Able Archer. Why don't you look into it?
Speaker 3 (29:09):
And he said, I really think this is an unsolved
mystery of the Cold War. And I was pretty hooked
right there.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Like me, Nate heard about the mysterious able Archer eighty
three story and asked himself, why doesn't anyone know about it?
If we narrowly escaped nuclear armageddon, shouldn't there be a
national holiday or something? We should have Able Archer Day,
a day that commemorates our wonderful avoidance of nuclear annihilation.
I'm not just saying this because I want an extra
(29:35):
Monday off work, not dying that's caused for celebration. All
jokes aside. Nate was seriously concerned. I mean, if something
like able Archer can happen, what does that say about
how precarious our situation really is? Is the world safe?
One thing is clear. If we're going to learn anything
(29:57):
from this, we got to know exactly what happened, Thank
god for Nate Jones. At first, there just wasn't much
out there as far as sources go. Anybody who knew
the details of the crisis wasn't talking. There were a
few mentions of a nineteen eighty three crisis, and various
memoirs from retired politicians and so forth, but it was
also vague. I'll let Nate paraphrase.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
We're not exactly sure, but it was a very tense
situation and we were worried.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
There was only one primary source available that even mentioned
Able Archer eighty three by name, a CIA document written
shortly after it happened.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
So here we have so this is implications of recent
Soviet military political activities, and this is the first CIA
report on what happened during the war scand what happened
during n Able Archer.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
This document is a crucial piece of the Able Archer
puzzle because it reveals what the CIA thought about the
crisis at the time, and it provides a hint as
to why the public wouldn't learn about it until decades later.
Classic CIA bullshit. I mean, they still haven't told us
why they killed Kennedy. It was written in May of
(31:13):
nineteen eighty four, six months after Able Archer, and it says, yeah,
during the Able Archer eighty three exercise, it sort of
looked like the Soviets were getting battle.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Ready, and it listed all these alarming things. But it
came to the conclusion that quote, we believe strongly that
Soviet actions are not inspired and Soviet leaders do not
perceive a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with
the United States.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
The report says, yeah, sure it looks scary, but in hindsight,
we don't think the Soviets were actually gonna do anything.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
So the conclusion was that the war scare is not real.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
That's right. The reason nobody knows about the Able Archer
war scare is because for decades the CIA would deny
that anything dangerous happened during that exercise, but rumors still
swirled in the intelligence community. Maybe there was more to
the story, which you've probably guessed because there's a bunch
more episodes left in this podcast. Nate Jones, fresh out
(32:13):
of college, had a hunch that he could piece together
the truth about Able Archer given access to the right records.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
We couldn't really tell a good history without the records,
and we couldn't get the good records without a fight
against the government.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Oh it's on now, might be a good time to
introduce another main character.
Speaker 10 (32:38):
I don't know whether you know it or not, but
I have a new hobby. I am collecting stories.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Ronald Wilson Reagan, the man knew the power of a
good anecdote. I mean, the guy could really spin a yarn.
Speaker 10 (32:50):
But I remember the story of a fellow, which makes
me think of a story. Everything makes me think of
a story. I wanted to tell a story, whether anything
reminded me or not.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
He also famously loved movies. No surprise there. He was
a movie star. Only president ever to make a movie
with a chimp. To be fair, Calvin Coolidge was in
a play with a baboon once, but it's not the
same thing, and it's also not true. Where was I?
Reagan hosted regular screenings at Camp David throughout his presidency.
In fact, he loved movies so much he used to
(33:21):
write film reviews in his diary Saturday, February fourteenth, nine
to five. Funny, but one scene made me mad, A
truly funny scene. If the three gals had played getting drunk,
but no, they had to get stoned on pot. It
was an endorsement of pot smoking for any young person
(33:42):
who sees the picture. Yeah, so that's actually a totally
real Ronald Reagan diary entry. I shit you not. The
man took movies very seriously and really overestimated the influence
of a stoned Dolly parton Ronald Reagan's presidency was like
the plot a movie, and he was the hero, an
(34:02):
American cowboy with a white hat, fighting his nemesis, the
evil Communist menace. And he played the part beautifully.
Speaker 10 (34:10):
When action is called for, we're taking it. Our response
can make the difference between peaceful change or disorder in violence.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
In fact, he played the part so well that he
may have pushed it a little too far. Now if
you ask just about anybody how the Cold War ended,
you'll get one of two answers. Either A. Ronald Reagan
was strong, showed those Soviets who was boss and they
backed down. Or B. Reagan was just lucky enough to
be the guy sitting in the White House when a
(34:38):
young Soviet leader stepped in and reformed the Joint. But
what if there was an entirely different reason the Cold
War ended? What if the Cold War really ended because
of Abel Archer.
Speaker 5 (34:54):
He was Ronald evil Empire. Reagan talked a tough game
against the Soviets, engaged a military build up.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Meet Beth Fischer. She's an historian and author of a
book called The Reagan Reversal, where she writes about a
drastic shift in Ronald Reagan's attitude towards the Soviet Union
and listeners. That shift has very interesting timing.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
I was doing my doctoral research and it was on
US foreign policy, and I was going through a lot
of speeches from the Reagan administration from the early eighties.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Beth says that Reagan's speeches were pretty consistent from nineteen
eighty one to about October thirty first, nineteen eighty three,
just before able Archer.
Speaker 5 (35:34):
The Reagan administration was pretty confrontational. They charged that the
Soviet Union was immoral, they lied, they cheat, They were
the greatest source of international insecurity.
Speaker 10 (35:46):
One of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and
the value of human life, and seeks constantly to expand
and dominate other nations.
Speaker 5 (35:56):
The next major speech came on January sixteenth, nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
In his first major speech since Able Archer, Ronald Reagan
steps on stage and the American public meets a very
new president.
Speaker 10 (36:09):
During these first days of nineteen eighty four, I would
like to share with you and the people of the
world my thoughts on a subject of great importance to
the cause of peace, relations between the United States and
the Soviet Union. Just suppose with me for a moment.
But an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say
(36:31):
in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the
rain or a storm, with a Jim and Sally, and
there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
President Reagan told this little story about these two couples,
Ivan and Anya, and Jim and Sally.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Ivan and Anya, a lovely couple from Moscow, and our
beloved Jim and Sally from I don't know Toledo. They
just feel Midwestern to me.
Speaker 10 (37:00):
And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would
be saying to Ivan, wasn't she nice? She also teaches music.
They might even have decided they were all going to
get together for dinner some evening soon.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Ah, dinner, How cute. Two months ago, Reagan would have
ended that story with Jim poking Ivan's eyeballs out and
Sally shoving Anya in front of a bus for freedom.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
And it was really different. It was different in tone,
it was different in substance.
Speaker 10 (37:27):
We do not threaten the Soviet Union. Our two countries
have never fought each other. There's no reason why we
ever should let us begin now than cute.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
The media picked up on Reagan's shift, the Ivan and
Anya tail would go down and speech writing history. But
when Beth came across this speech, what caught her attention
was one sentence, so slight, so discreet, that if you
didn't know what to listen for, you might miss it
all together.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
Let's see, I have a quote here. We need to
find meaningful ways to reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations.
Surrounding military activities. I eventually learned that early drafts of
the speech had been circulating within Washington in mid December.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
And remember the old Reagan, the tough guy, was still
giving hard line speeches right up until November one.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
So my question became, what happened between November one and
mid December? And that's when I discovered Able Archer.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Two months ago, a very secret nuclear near fuck up
may have unfolded during November's Able Larger exercise. And then
all of a sudden, this very aggressive, very anti communist
president is talking about Sally braiding Anya's hair. All of
a sudden, he's worried about reducing the potential for misinterpretation
surrounding military activities. Pretty interesting timing. I mean, I'm know
(38:55):
erk Gio Plaurot, but seem like there might be a
connection here.
Speaker 10 (38:59):
To reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations surrounding military activities.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
And boom, did you hear that? That's Able Archer right
in the speech. Over twenty years after Able Archer, Nate
Jones began his quest to find out what really happened.
(39:26):
As a student of history and a living human being,
he was more than a little concerned about how a
nuclear near miss was just a rumor in academic circles.
Was George Schultz hiding something when he spoke to Americans
during that panel? And is it just a coincidence that
Reagan changed his tune so dramatically Only months later? Nate
(39:48):
started at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It's a massive
building overlooking mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the heart
of Semi Valley, California. Inside the Reagan Foundation has completely
reconstructed Reagan's air one, which sits perched above a giant
souvenir shop. Nancy and Ronald Reagan are even buried there
at the library, not the souvenir shop, parded by a
(40:10):
fridge magnet when the great Communicator's corpse is staring right
at you, and a couple of floors down in the basement,
there's an archive. And that's where Nate begins his fight.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
I go to the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library and
go through all the boxes.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Looking through reams and reams of paperwork from our government's past,
hoping to discover some shred of evidence amongst the redactions
for anything to do with able Archer eighty three, the
National Security Advisors files US military documents, documents from our allies,
anything that could paint a picture of how a NATO
exercise might have changed the course of history. And as
(40:49):
you might assume, the archive isn't small. Presidential libraries contain
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
It really essentially is a dumping ground.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
But hidden amongst all of them, there could be a
needle in the haystack.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Well, when I was there, if my spidy senses went up.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Nate finds a box. He blows off decades of cobwebs.
He opens it, swats away the moths as they see
light for the first time in twenty No, I'm being dramatic.
The point is the box is important. It's labeled NATO
Military Exercises November nineteen eighty three, jackpot.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
So I go through that and pull out the folder,
open it up and it has this I believe it's
a green card that says every historian's nightmare withheld classified.
Go to the next folder, same thing. So it's a
little bit heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
But this young historical treasure hunter will not be deterred.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
But I go to the archivist on duty and say, hey,
what's the mechanism for getting this withheld stuff released. And
I still remember he kind of gave me a kind
of a mean laugh. He said, well, you could file
a foyer or a review request, but don't hold your breath.
You can file, but you'll never get it.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
What a motherfucker god bureaucratic piece of self righteous do
dag motherfucker? Am I right?
Speaker 11 (42:20):
Then?
Speaker 8 (42:20):
I go too far?
Speaker 1 (42:21):
I went too far.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I felt that we had a right to know what happened.
It's possible that it shows this danger unacceptable danger of
nuclear weapons. And if they're that dangerous in the world,
was that dangerous then in nineteen eighty three and might
still be that dangerous now? That danger shouldn't be hidden
your classification. And that right there got me a little
(42:46):
bit angry and said, you know what, I'm gonna fight
this until the end. And I don't think the government
should be keeping this secret. And I'm gonna learn about
FOYA and I'm going to learn about appeals and maybe
even sue because the government's telling me, no, you can't
have the documents, and I want the document.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Here's a message to that asshole who worked as the
arkivist on duty at the Reagan Presidential Library in the
year two thousand and four, our fearless for your warrior.
Get the dacks and what would they show? A very
alarming account of what really went down in nineteen eighty three,
(43:21):
spurred by intelligence failures, reckless policies, failed diplomacy, and outright arrogance.
Buckle up, boys and girls. That's going to be a
terrifying ride over the rest of the season. Will spin
a yarn so nuts that it would have Reagan himself
shitting in his ten gallon stetson. We'll tell you how
nineteen eighty three was a truly batshit year for the
(43:44):
human race, complete with fake military invasions, a commercial airliner
full of passengers shot down, and a calculator right out
of a spy movie that might have saved the world.
And all that craziness would set the stage for the
Big Snaffo, a close call with nuclear war that would
be kept top secret for decades. Next week on Snaffoo,
(44:07):
we'll get into the minds of the button pushers themselves,
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Yuri and drop Off,
two men whose provocations in paranoia would push the world
to the brink.
Speaker 10 (44:20):
It did give me a real understanding of the communist menace.
Speaker 9 (44:25):
Ronald Reagan, having campaigned on being top, is not going
to stand up and say.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Oh, that was just for the cameras.
Speaker 9 (44:31):
I'm actually an old softie.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
I love borsh.
Speaker 5 (44:34):
Really, for the first time in my life, I felt
like there could be nuclear.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Warf SNAFU is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment,
and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our
producer is Carl Nellis. Associate producer Tory Smith. It's executive
produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy
(45:01):
Chug and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Sarah Joyner,
with additional writing from me Elliott Kalen, and Whitney Donaldson.
Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis Make the rubble Bouts.
Olivia Kenny is our production assistant. Our creative executive is
Brett Harris. Additional research and fact checking by Charles Richter,
Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Original music and
(45:22):
sound designed by Dan Rosatto. Some archival audio from this
episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic film nineteen eighty three,
The Rink of Apocalypse. Thank you, mister Downing for permission
to use it. Special thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt Aisenstadt.
Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Here.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted
to remind you that my brand new book is coming
out on April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive
Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre
order it right now at snafudashbook dot com. Trust me,
if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.
(00:24):
It's got all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we
just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker.
I am also going on tour to celebrate that's right.
I'm coming to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago,
San Francisco, and my hometown Los Angeles. So if you've
ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q
(00:46):
and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting
turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head
to Snaffo dashbook dot com to pre order the book
and check out all the tour details and day, or
just click the link in the show notes that'll work too.
Did you ever watch a movie as a kid and
(01:07):
convince yourself that it was real that its outlandish premise
could possibly come true. I know I did, and for me,
one of those movies was Wargames.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Great to meet you, Great to meet you too.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
I'm ed by the way. Yeah that's Matthew Broadrick. He's
a national treasure and also the star of Wargames, a
movie about an almost accidental nuclear war that I watched
maybe one hundred times as a kid, came out in
nineteen eighty three, and it was Matthew's breakout role.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
The fact that I had gotten the lead of a
you know, studio movie was incredible, Yeah, absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
His character was a hacker, a tech genius. David Lightman
was a moister at computer games, and Matthew was great
in it. I mean, obviously, right, he's an incredible actor.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
But wait, now do I adjust my volume? Can you speak?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
You guys talking talking talking? Say?
Speaker 5 (02:15):
Gee?
Speaker 4 (02:16):
No, nodding because I want to now pretend that it's working. Okay, Yeah,
so it's perfect.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Matthew Broderick is clearly not a tech genius in real life,
but that's just further proof what a great actor he is.
So in War Games, teenage hacker David Leitman tries to
impress a girl at school, Jennifer, played by another eighties icon,
Ali Sheety. Along the way, he accidentally hacks into a
supercomputer that the US is using to game out World
(02:42):
War three scenarios, hence wargamell.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
How about global thermallear.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It gets misinterpreted as a real nuclear attack and almost
starts World War three?
Speaker 6 (02:56):
Launch detiction.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
We have a story launch detction.
Speaker 7 (03:02):
Terrifying.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, I am not charmed by that. I am terrified
by that. When I was nine years old, wargames really
captured my imagination in the sense that I became utterly
convinced it was real. I even had a breakdown at
summer camp because of it. All the other kids were
(03:25):
having a grand old time. Meanwhile, I was just terrified
that at any moment we'd all die in a fiery
nuclear armageddon. Yeah, I guess I was a bit of
a wet blanket while everyone else was just trying to
get pumped up for s'mores. So why am I talking
to Matthew Broderick about wargames? After all, It's just a movie,
(03:47):
an outlandish premise, a fantasy.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Eventually we all grow up and realize that movies aren't real.
There are no accidental nuclear wars. Right, Well, my friends,
imagine my surprise when I learned that the premise of
Wargames was fucking real. Yeah, it came true only months
(04:14):
after the movie's release. That's right. As it turns out,
in nineteen eighty three, a real life military exercise, a wargame,
almost started an actual nuclear war, just like Wargames. This
exercise that almost ended at all. It goes by the
code name Able Archer eighty three, and that's what this
(04:36):
show is about.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Wow, that's an amazing story.
Speaker 7 (04:43):
I I'm surprised.
Speaker 8 (04:44):
I don't know about that, but I don't think I
do know about it.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Too bad they don't give out an oscar for best
nuclear war prediction. The Wargames screenwriters would have been a
shoe in. It's like kind of a perfect screenplay. I
don't think they were too far off. When I first
heard the story of Abel Archer eighty three, let's just
say my childhood fears were instantly validated. Thinking back on
(05:10):
that moment at summer camp, paralyzed by the fear that
the outlandish plot of war Games would come true, camp
counselors hovering around me, trying to console me, saying, come on, dude,
it's just a movie. Let's go canoeing. Everything's gonna be fine. Well,
looking back, I realize now it was not fine. It
was so incredibly not fine. They were wrong and I
(05:32):
was right. I'd just like to say, on behalf of
nine year old me, I fucking told you so? Who
That felt good? But vindication aside, Learning this story still
leaves me a little unnerved, maybe even alarmed, Because if
a military exercise almost caused a nuclear war in nineteen
(05:53):
eighty three and nobody knew about it, what a complete
and utter snaffoo. Snaffoo is a military term first used
by soldiers in World War Two. It's an acronym snaffho.
It stands for situation normal, all fucked up, meaning this
(06:15):
is so fucked up. But then again, isn't it always?
That's what this show is about. The gas, the disasters,
history's greatest screw ups. This season the story of Able
Archer eighty three. It's the ultimate Cold War mystery, a
stew of espionage, paranoia, shady politics, and dangerous miscalculations. Oh
(06:37):
and a lot of mind games. Put on your hazmat suits, listeners,
I'm ed Elmes. Your host and this is Snaffo Able
Archer eighty three.
Speaker 9 (07:08):
It's just this whole game of deception and count deception
of who can you trust?
Speaker 5 (07:13):
Oh wait, he's preparing a sudden.
Speaker 10 (07:16):
I heard a young father saying, I love my little
girls more than anything, and I would rather see my
little girls die now than have them grow up under communism.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Really, for the first time in my life, I felt
like there could be nuclear war.
Speaker 9 (07:32):
It wasn't a question of would it happen, It was
a question of when was it going to happen.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
We were preparing to fight armageddon.
Speaker 9 (07:38):
That's what we're.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Told, That's what we believed.
Speaker 9 (07:41):
We were training to fight the end of the world.
Speaker 6 (07:51):
It was a week just like every other week. Abral
Archer eighty three was not anything out of the ordinary.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
This is Jean Gay. He was a participant in the
nineteen Able Archer wargame. Gene like a lot of men
who participated in Able Archer that year recall it the
same way, which is to say, they don't really recall
much at all.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Nothing to me from that exercise at the time. You know,
jumped out.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
That's Colonel Spike Calendar and he says the same thing Nope,
nothing of note to these men. That week in early
November nineteen eighty three was just a week like any
other week, just another week of standard military exercises, practicing
how to fight the end of the world as one does.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
The whole purpose of able Archer was the emphasis on
the practice of the nuclear weapons release for caizures.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Able Archer was a NATO exercise in November of nineteen
eighty three. The Able Archer players sat in a bunker
in Belgium practicing how if it came to it, they'd
fight a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. It's like
a soccer team doing drills, but instead of training for
a game, they're training for armageddon, which, like a soccer game,
(09:01):
you can't use your hands because they got blown off.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
The whole idea was if you ever had to do it,
you know you didn't want to do it for the
first time.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
When Spike says do it, he's referring to the task
of launching planet destroying weapons. It's an example of how
military professionals are weirdly cavalier when they're talking about their work.
It's kind of shocking how something so gnarly can sound
so routine.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
How do you look at what the requirements truly are,
you know, for those weapons systems and the numbers of them.
So it would be a matter of being counting and
in some respects if you have a Soviet division, what
is the number of weapons that might be required to
reduce the effectiveness of that division to where it was
no longer military capable?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
See what I mean? My point is this, to men
like Gene and Spike, there was nothing exceptional about gaming
out of fictional war during a b large It was routine.
But a few decades later Gene and Spike would learn
that Able Archer eighty three was anything but routine.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
I was in my own little world. I hate to
use the word oblivious, but I've used that word before.
Speaker 6 (10:18):
It was many years later they found out about it,
that anything other than the exercise took place in the
real world situation that occurred at during that time. I
was not aware of that until years afterwards.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, I never heard of anything more about this exercise
until what twenty or twenty five years later.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
What Gene and Spike would come to learn is that
while they were sitting in their bunker back in nineteen
eighty three rehearsing the end of the world missiles to
strike targets in Moscow. How the Soviets were listening, and
they seemed to be convinced it was not a rehearsal
at all. Soviet missile commanders were placed on high a.
Soviet leaders retreated to their bunkers, fingers hovering over the
(11:03):
proverbial big red button, and NATO had no idea.
Speaker 9 (11:11):
I mean, it is a miracle. We did not all die,
Like it's just goofy.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
This is Jeffrey Lewis. He's an expert on nuclear history
and geopolitics, and he finds the whole story of Able Archer,
what he calls the war Scare to be sort of funny.
Speaker 9 (11:28):
Almost all of the war scare is totally self inflicted,
which makes it like really darkly comic.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
I have to agree. There's an old saying that tragedy
plus time equals comedy. Well, if that's true, then a
story about a nuclear near miss plus about forty years
should be fucking hilarious.
Speaker 9 (11:44):
Because if you step back, it sounds crazy, right, It
sounds crazy that we could have had a serious nuclear
crisis that nobody knew about. Like that's nuts.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
It is nuts. Jeffrey because it's not just that able
archer participants like Gene and Spike didn't know that a
newnuclear crisis was unfolding under their noses. No one knew.
Let that sink in for a second. If it's possible
that a nuclear crisis could unfold right under our noses,
that we were in danger without knowing it, does that
(12:15):
mean it's still possible? All right, let's set the stage
a little bit. It's the nineteen eighties. There was certainly
a general and very pervasive anxiety about nuclear weapons. Pretty
Much everywhere you looked, you'd find nuclear paranoia. It wasn't
just wargames. It was all over pop culture. This delightful
(12:38):
little number is ninety nine Loft Balloons by Nina. It's
about one hundred red balloons accidentally inciting a nuclear war.
Kind of heavy for a kitchy pop hit. The nineteen
eighty three Bond film had a nuclear plot. The doctor
Seuss was feeling.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
The heat this bomb on the zekes just as fast
as you can.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Evening chimed in, I love that shit personally, I love
that song, and I just love that Sting threw his
hat right in the middle of an international conflict. Anyway,
when it comes to examples of nuclear anxiety in nineteen
eighty three pop culture, there's actually one that stands above
(13:21):
all the rest. It was just a made for TV movie,
but it became a cultural event and it would actually
play a role in our Cold War mystery.
Speaker 11 (13:32):
It was a movie like no other movie, and it
had a profound impact on New York.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
That's story.
Speaker 11 (13:37):
Next, we'll hear from people who like you watch the
Ultimate Disaster.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Movie the day after, a movie that would scare the
living shit out of America.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
More than seven hundred people packed Riverside Church tonight to
watch the day after.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Many said they came here because they were afraid to
watch it alone.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Everyone, and by everyone, I mean a hundred million people,
almost half the US population at the time, gathered around
their TVs on the evening of November twentieth, nineteen eighty three,
and tuned into ABC to watch it.
Speaker 11 (14:12):
Before the movie begins, I would like to caution parents
about the graphic depiction of nuclear explosions and then devastating
effects in a moment.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
The day after that, gather around kids, time to fill
your innocent little heads with deep, reverberating drama. Past the popcorn.
Speaker 8 (14:28):
I tried to do my part in making people keenly
aware of what the real consequences would be.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
This is Ed Hume, he wrote the day after. The
film is set at the border of Kansas and Missouri.
That's where the US nuclear missile silos are. The main
characters are average townspeople in the American heartland.
Speaker 8 (14:49):
A bunch of people living in the Midwest doing ordinary things.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
At first, the whole nuclear war thing isn't really front
and center. It just kind of lurks in the periphery.
But even as it creeps in, the characters can't accept
their fate.
Speaker 8 (15:02):
What was that. There's one saying where a woman is
so in denial that she's running around making beds as
they know that missiles are being launched.
Speaker 5 (15:12):
Don't bother with the.
Speaker 8 (15:13):
Bed just now, even we've got to get down below. Listen,
those missiles have all gone off.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Oh my gosh, Wow, she really wants to make those beds.
Speaker 8 (15:32):
And then it happens.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It happens, the heartland is evaporated. The rest of the
film is stomach churning. To put it lightly, It showed
what a nuclear war would actually look like. Flashes of light,
lives instantaneously incinerated. But the whole explosion part isn't the
(15:57):
worst of it, because you get to see what happens
the day after nuclear fallout, radiation, poisoning, blistering skin and
dying organs, piles of bodies and rubble, looting, hoarding, and
everyday Americans turning on each other. I mean, all jokes aside,
this is grim fucking stuff.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
The general pabla, they were pardon my language, what they
were scared of shutless.
Speaker 10 (16:23):
I for one, felt that it was just devastating.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Like every horror story you've ever read. Roamed to one story.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
We got a glimpse of what is really at stake
in a nuclear war.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
I just want to go die, went to blast and
not have to live and start all over again.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Oh okay, didn't heed the parental advisory. This is how
that clip makes me feel. Okay. So yeah, in nineteen
eighty three, there was a general sense of nuclear doom. Hell,
it's why I had a mental break down at summer camp.
(17:01):
But we didn't know that there was a specific crisis
to be afraid of. We didn't know that we might
have almost had a nuclear war. During NATO's annual able
archer exercise. So then the question becomes why.
Speaker 11 (17:16):
Not there is and you probably need it. About now,
there is some good news.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
This is Ted Copple from Nightline. He's hosting a live
panel about the day after right after the movie aired.
Speaker 11 (17:29):
If you can take a quick look out the window,
it's all still there.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Wow, deeply reassuring Ted. Anyway, Celebrity scientist Carl Sagan was there,
telling an already nauseous audience that he thought the film's
portrayal of nuclear war was actually not as bad as
it would be if it really happened. Yeh boy. Henry
Kissinger was there too, probably talking about feasting on the
souls of innocent children or something, but before the panel began.
Speaker 11 (17:56):
Joining us live from his home in suburban Washington is
the Secretary of State, mister George Schultz.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Ted Copple brings out US Secretary of State George Schultz,
President Reagan's right hand man. He was a serious man,
loyal to the president, famously bragged about enjoying staring contests
with the Soviets, waiting for them to blink, comforting and so.
Mere minutes after the American public watched this horrifying film,
(18:23):
hearts still in their stomachs. The man who would be
standing next to the button pusher in chief answers the
burning question at the front of every viewer's mind.
Speaker 11 (18:33):
The future as we've just viewed it tonight. Is that
the future as it will be, or only the future
as it may be?
Speaker 7 (18:41):
Neither that is not the future at all. The film
is a vivid and dramatic portrayal of the fact that
nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and
the realization of it has been the policy of the
United States for decades now, the successful policy of the
(19:03):
United States.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
If you watch the clip, George Schultz is shifty as hell.
His eyes keep flickering just to the right of the
camera and then back again, like he's reading Q cards.
He looks scared. Ted Season's journalist that he is smells
a little bullshit, he presses George.
Speaker 11 (19:26):
Mister Schultz, that is the answer of a Secretary of
State to a reporter. And that's fair enough, because that's
what you and I, respectively are. But what would a
George Schultz who is talking to a member of his
family say in response to the same question, same answer, Well,
I would give the same answer.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
I'll tell you why I think George is nervous. It's
because eleven days before this interview able Archer eighty three
could have caused a nuclear war. A man in Schultz's
position would have known about that, right. Surely he was
shitting his slacks for the past eleven days trying to
figure out how such a colossal fuck up could have happened.
(20:03):
Now would be a great time to come clean, to say, yeah,
we're gonna shake things up with our nuclear policy, because
the movie's right, this is scary shit. And yet, after
watching the day after, George Schultz, Secretary of State, assures
the American public that the administration status quo is effective
(20:24):
in preventing nuclear war. In eleven days after a nuclear war.
Speaker 9 (20:29):
Scare, it's a very different kind of crisis because it's
so clumsy.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Here's Jeffrey Lewis again.
Speaker 9 (20:46):
You know, this is more like two drunks in a
bar circling one another. And it's not so much that
anybody would deliberately choose to start the war. It's just
that things would spiral out of control.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
The two drunks here are, of course, the United States
and the Soviet Union their drink bombs. And I'm not
talking Jaeger. Here's the part of the show where I
give you a crash course on the Cold War. Get
out your pencils, kids, Welcome to Arms Race one oh one.
Speaker 11 (21:18):
An ADAM bomb destroys or injures in three ways by blast, heat,
and radioactivity.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
The og atomic bomb was invented by the Americans in
the forties, you know, the one Hiroshima, Nagasaki. It only
took the Soviets five years to figure it out for themselves,
and once they had the bomb too, it began a
decades long race for bigger and better death machines.
Speaker 9 (21:40):
The fun thing about the Cold War is that there
were a huge variety of nuclear weapons and nuclear yields.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Jeffrey and I have very different definitions of fun.
Speaker 9 (21:52):
So pretty soon after the end of World War II,
the United States developed a much more powerful nuclear weapon
than even the sea the destroyers that we saw dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and these were called therma nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
This is the early fifties. A thermonuclear weapon uses the
radiation from the initial blast to ignite an even bigger blast,
a bomb within a bomb. The result is a warhead
that's about the same size as the atom bomb, but
way more destructive, like a million tons of explosive power
instead of ten thousand. In other words, it was economical
(22:27):
a bigger catastrophe for a smaller cost. You can't argue
with savings like that.
Speaker 9 (22:33):
Once the United States, followed by other countries, developed therm
nuclear weapons, there was no limit to how large a
nuclear weapon one could make. The freeze that came to
be used about the amount of nuclear destructive power was
overkill because each side was worried that the other side
would strike them first, so they needed to have backups
and redundancy and more than you needed. And so in
(22:57):
practice what that led to was each side having the
capacity to destroy the other many, many times over, to
make the rubble bounce. In one particular phrase.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Back in the sixties, the US had enough nuclear weapons
to destroy the Soviet Union fifty times over, you know,
just in case some little cockroach escaped the first forty
nine blasts, which set the table quite nicely for this.
Speaker 7 (23:25):
Good evening, my fellow citizens.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
That's John F. Kennedy back in nineteen sixty two telling
the world in a televised speech from the White House
that a nuclear crisis was unfolding in Cuba. US biplanes
had discovered that the Soviet Union was building nuclear missile
sites on the Caribbean island nation, a little too close
to the United States for comfort.
Speaker 7 (23:45):
The purpose of these bases can be none other than
to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
The US Navy set up a blockade, trying to prevent
any Soviet ships from bringing their nukes anywhere near the island.
The Soviet Chips approached the blockade nuclear weapons in tow
It was a full fledged nuclear standoff. The news coverage
of the Cuban missile crisis was impossible to ignore. A
major world event became television drama. For thirteen days, Americans
(24:18):
sat glued to their televisions until finally it was over.
Speaker 11 (24:24):
Under aerial surveillance, the missiles that had threatened the United
States went back where they came from.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Everyone breathed a sigh of Marlborough smoke filled relief. And
did we learn our lesson? Did we scale down operations
at the bomb factory and literally cool our jets? No, No,
my dear listener, of course we didn't. In the late
sixties and seventies, the US would build more weapons. The
(24:51):
Soviets would build a lot more weapons, We'd get rid
of some and then build some more. By the early
nineteen eighties, our nuclear fruit basket contained big nukes, small nukes,
extremely precise nukes.
Speaker 9 (25:03):
And so the question naturally arises, like, why the hell
did we do that? And I think the answer lies
in the fact that we didn't have a better idea.
I'm just going to build as many nuclear weapons as
I can to keep the bad guys away from me.
How am I going to think about it any more
than that? And that's a very powerful, simple idea, wrong
but incredibly powerful. And it's how you end up with
(25:25):
two countries with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed
at each other, ready on a moment's notice to end
civilization as we know it. You know, over who controls Berlin,
which admittedly is a very nice city.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
And that just about sums up that successful nuclear policy
George Schultz was talking about earlier.
Speaker 7 (25:47):
The successful policy of the United States.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Each side made a gamble that if they could just
build enough weapons, their adversary wouldn't dare test them, so
they didn't need diplomacy. They were bound by the contract
of mutually assured destruction. It was a horrific game of
nuclear chicken, and it would lead right to Able Archer
(26:12):
eighty three, which some say is the closest we came
to a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile crisis. But
here's the thing. Able Archer isn't anything like the Cuban
missile crisis. In fact, it's not like most crises we've experienced,
not just because no one knew about it, but because
it was completely unintentional, a mistake. It's not like I
(26:34):
don't know the Vietnam War or Russia's insane invasion of Ukraine. Today,
during Able Archer, two countries with absolutely no desire to
get into a nuclear conflict may have almost started one
in spite of themselves.
Speaker 9 (26:51):
If the Reagan administration nearly sleepwalked into a nuclear war,
that suggests those people shouldn't be let anywhere near positions
of power. And if the intelligence community the fact that
the Reagan administration was sleepwalking toward nuclear war, that suggests
we need different analysts.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
If all that's true, then it makes perfect sense the
Reagan administration would not want to leak a snaffoo this massive,
so the public would never hear about Abel Archer eighty three. Instead,
it would become nothing more than a Cold War rumor,
a myth only whispered about in the back hallways of
the Pentagon. And it might have stayed that way if
(27:28):
it wasn't for Nate Jones.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Walking through.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
This is the vault.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
It really looks like the warehouse at the end of Indiana.
Jones of just boxes, boxes, boxes. Sometimes I used to
come here and just do a little bit of work
because the atmosphere of thousands of boxes looming over and
me helps me work.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
This is Nate Jones, an historian. Actually he's really more
of a sleuth, like a history detective who has dedicated
almost twenty years of his career to you uncovering what
the hell really happened during Able Archer eighty three.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
My desk is overrun with Foyer requests. It looks like
at least ten thousand pages of Foyer requests and responses.
So it's definitely a tree unfriendly business. But the government
works on paper, so we got to work on paper.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
This FOYA that Nate is talking about, like everything in government,
it's an acronym. It stands for the Freedom of Information Act.
And if you can't tell it has dominated his life
for the past decade. For ten years, Nate worked at
the National Security Archive, where he and his colleagues used
the Freedom of Information Act to pry classified information about
(28:40):
able Archer eighty three out of the government's clause. I
like to picture them wrestling with a very stubborn bald eagle.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At one point
in time, Nate was like most people. He didn't know
about Able Archer eighty three until one day in two
thousand and four, a professor of his uttered a few
words that totally changed the course of his life. He said, Hey, Nate,
(29:04):
I heard about this nuclear fuck up in nineteen eighty
three called Able Archer. Why don't you look into it?
Speaker 3 (29:09):
And he said, I really think this is an unsolved
mystery of the Cold War. And I was pretty hooked
right there.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Like me, Nate heard about the mysterious able Archer eighty
three story and asked himself, why doesn't anyone know about it?
If we narrowly escaped nuclear armageddon, shouldn't there be a
national holiday or something? We should have Able Archer Day,
a day that commemorates our wonderful avoidance of nuclear annihilation.
I'm not just saying this because I want an extra
(29:35):
Monday off work, not dying that's caused for celebration. All
jokes aside. Nate was seriously concerned. I mean, if something
like able Archer can happen, what does that say about
how precarious our situation really is? Is the world safe?
One thing is clear. If we're going to learn anything
(29:57):
from this, we got to know exactly what happened, Thank
god for Nate Jones. At first, there just wasn't much
out there as far as sources go. Anybody who knew
the details of the crisis wasn't talking. There were a
few mentions of a nineteen eighty three crisis, and various
memoirs from retired politicians and so forth, but it was
also vague. I'll let Nate paraphrase.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
We're not exactly sure, but it was a very tense
situation and we were worried.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
There was only one primary source available that even mentioned
Able Archer eighty three by name, a CIA document written
shortly after it happened.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
So here we have so this is implications of recent
Soviet military political activities, and this is the first CIA
report on what happened during the war scand what happened
during n Able Archer.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
This document is a crucial piece of the Able Archer
puzzle because it reveals what the CIA thought about the
crisis at the time, and it provides a hint as
to why the public wouldn't learn about it until decades later.
Classic CIA bullshit. I mean, they still haven't told us
why they killed Kennedy. It was written in May of
(31:13):
nineteen eighty four, six months after Able Archer, and it says, yeah,
during the Able Archer eighty three exercise, it sort of
looked like the Soviets were getting battle.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Ready, and it listed all these alarming things. But it
came to the conclusion that quote, we believe strongly that
Soviet actions are not inspired and Soviet leaders do not
perceive a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with
the United States.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
The report says, yeah, sure it looks scary, but in hindsight,
we don't think the Soviets were actually gonna do anything.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
So the conclusion was that the war scare is not real.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
That's right. The reason nobody knows about the Able Archer
war scare is because for decades the CIA would deny
that anything dangerous happened during that exercise, but rumors still
swirled in the intelligence community. Maybe there was more to
the story, which you've probably guessed because there's a bunch
more episodes left in this podcast. Nate Jones, fresh out
(32:13):
of college, had a hunch that he could piece together
the truth about Able Archer given access to the right records.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
We couldn't really tell a good history without the records,
and we couldn't get the good records without a fight
against the government.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Oh it's on now, might be a good time to
introduce another main character.
Speaker 10 (32:38):
I don't know whether you know it or not, but
I have a new hobby. I am collecting stories.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Ronald Wilson Reagan, the man knew the power of a
good anecdote. I mean, the guy could really spin a yarn.
Speaker 10 (32:50):
But I remember the story of a fellow, which makes
me think of a story. Everything makes me think of
a story. I wanted to tell a story, whether anything
reminded me or not.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
He also famously loved movies. No surprise there. He was
a movie star. Only president ever to make a movie
with a chimp. To be fair, Calvin Coolidge was in
a play with a baboon once, but it's not the
same thing, and it's also not true. Where was I?
Reagan hosted regular screenings at Camp David throughout his presidency.
In fact, he loved movies so much he used to
(33:21):
write film reviews in his diary Saturday, February fourteenth, nine
to five. Funny, but one scene made me mad, A
truly funny scene. If the three gals had played getting drunk,
but no, they had to get stoned on pot. It
was an endorsement of pot smoking for any young person
(33:42):
who sees the picture. Yeah, so that's actually a totally
real Ronald Reagan diary entry. I shit you not. The
man took movies very seriously and really overestimated the influence
of a stoned Dolly parton Ronald Reagan's presidency was like
the plot a movie, and he was the hero, an
(34:02):
American cowboy with a white hat, fighting his nemesis, the
evil Communist menace. And he played the part beautifully.
Speaker 10 (34:10):
When action is called for, we're taking it. Our response
can make the difference between peaceful change or disorder in violence.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
In fact, he played the part so well that he
may have pushed it a little too far. Now if
you ask just about anybody how the Cold War ended,
you'll get one of two answers. Either A. Ronald Reagan
was strong, showed those Soviets who was boss and they
backed down. Or B. Reagan was just lucky enough to
be the guy sitting in the White House when a
(34:38):
young Soviet leader stepped in and reformed the Joint. But
what if there was an entirely different reason the Cold
War ended? What if the Cold War really ended because
of Abel Archer.
Speaker 5 (34:54):
He was Ronald evil Empire. Reagan talked a tough game
against the Soviets, engaged a military build up.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Meet Beth Fischer. She's an historian and author of a
book called The Reagan Reversal, where she writes about a
drastic shift in Ronald Reagan's attitude towards the Soviet Union
and listeners. That shift has very interesting timing.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
I was doing my doctoral research and it was on
US foreign policy, and I was going through a lot
of speeches from the Reagan administration from the early eighties.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Beth says that Reagan's speeches were pretty consistent from nineteen
eighty one to about October thirty first, nineteen eighty three,
just before able Archer.
Speaker 5 (35:34):
The Reagan administration was pretty confrontational. They charged that the
Soviet Union was immoral, they lied, they cheat, They were
the greatest source of international insecurity.
Speaker 10 (35:46):
One of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and
the value of human life, and seeks constantly to expand
and dominate other nations.
Speaker 5 (35:56):
The next major speech came on January sixteenth, nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
In his first major speech since Able Archer, Ronald Reagan
steps on stage and the American public meets a very
new president.
Speaker 10 (36:09):
During these first days of nineteen eighty four, I would
like to share with you and the people of the
world my thoughts on a subject of great importance to
the cause of peace, relations between the United States and
the Soviet Union. Just suppose with me for a moment.
But an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say
(36:31):
in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the
rain or a storm, with a Jim and Sally, and
there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
President Reagan told this little story about these two couples,
Ivan and Anya, and Jim and Sally.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Ivan and Anya, a lovely couple from Moscow, and our
beloved Jim and Sally from I don't know Toledo. They
just feel Midwestern to me.
Speaker 10 (37:00):
And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would
be saying to Ivan, wasn't she nice? She also teaches music.
They might even have decided they were all going to
get together for dinner some evening soon.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Ah, dinner, How cute. Two months ago, Reagan would have
ended that story with Jim poking Ivan's eyeballs out and
Sally shoving Anya in front of a bus for freedom.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
And it was really different. It was different in tone,
it was different in substance.
Speaker 10 (37:27):
We do not threaten the Soviet Union. Our two countries
have never fought each other. There's no reason why we
ever should let us begin now than cute.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
The media picked up on Reagan's shift, the Ivan and
Anya tail would go down and speech writing history. But
when Beth came across this speech, what caught her attention
was one sentence, so slight, so discreet, that if you
didn't know what to listen for, you might miss it
all together.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
Let's see, I have a quote here. We need to
find meaningful ways to reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations.
Surrounding military activities. I eventually learned that early drafts of
the speech had been circulating within Washington in mid December.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
And remember the old Reagan, the tough guy, was still
giving hard line speeches right up until November one.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
So my question became, what happened between November one and
mid December? And that's when I discovered Able Archer.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Two months ago, a very secret nuclear near fuck up
may have unfolded during November's Able Larger exercise. And then
all of a sudden, this very aggressive, very anti communist
president is talking about Sally braiding Anya's hair. All of
a sudden, he's worried about reducing the potential for misinterpretation
surrounding military activities. Pretty interesting timing. I mean, I'm know
(38:55):
erk Gio Plaurot, but seem like there might be a
connection here.
Speaker 10 (38:59):
To reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations surrounding military activities.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
And boom, did you hear that? That's Able Archer right
in the speech. Over twenty years after Able Archer, Nate
Jones began his quest to find out what really happened.
(39:26):
As a student of history and a living human being,
he was more than a little concerned about how a
nuclear near miss was just a rumor in academic circles.
Was George Schultz hiding something when he spoke to Americans
during that panel? And is it just a coincidence that
Reagan changed his tune so dramatically Only months later? Nate
(39:48):
started at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It's a massive
building overlooking mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the heart
of Semi Valley, California. Inside the Reagan Foundation has completely
reconstructed Reagan's air one, which sits perched above a giant
souvenir shop. Nancy and Ronald Reagan are even buried there
at the library, not the souvenir shop, parded by a
(40:10):
fridge magnet when the great Communicator's corpse is staring right
at you, and a couple of floors down in the basement,
there's an archive. And that's where Nate begins his fight.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
I go to the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library and
go through all the boxes.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Looking through reams and reams of paperwork from our government's past,
hoping to discover some shred of evidence amongst the redactions
for anything to do with able Archer eighty three, the
National Security Advisors files US military documents, documents from our allies,
anything that could paint a picture of how a NATO
exercise might have changed the course of history. And as
(40:49):
you might assume, the archive isn't small. Presidential libraries contain
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
It really essentially is a dumping ground.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
But hidden amongst all of them, there could be a
needle in the haystack.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Well, when I was there, if my spidy senses went up.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Nate finds a box. He blows off decades of cobwebs.
He opens it, swats away the moths as they see
light for the first time in twenty No, I'm being dramatic.
The point is the box is important. It's labeled NATO
Military Exercises November nineteen eighty three, jackpot.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
So I go through that and pull out the folder,
open it up and it has this I believe it's
a green card that says every historian's nightmare withheld classified.
Go to the next folder, same thing. So it's a
little bit heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
But this young historical treasure hunter will not be deterred.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
But I go to the archivist on duty and say, hey,
what's the mechanism for getting this withheld stuff released. And
I still remember he kind of gave me a kind
of a mean laugh. He said, well, you could file
a foyer or a review request, but don't hold your breath.
You can file, but you'll never get it.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
What a motherfucker god bureaucratic piece of self righteous do
dag motherfucker? Am I right?
Speaker 11 (42:20):
Then?
Speaker 8 (42:20):
I go too far?
Speaker 1 (42:21):
I went too far.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I felt that we had a right to know what happened.
It's possible that it shows this danger unacceptable danger of
nuclear weapons. And if they're that dangerous in the world,
was that dangerous then in nineteen eighty three and might
still be that dangerous now? That danger shouldn't be hidden
your classification. And that right there got me a little
(42:46):
bit angry and said, you know what, I'm gonna fight
this until the end. And I don't think the government
should be keeping this secret. And I'm gonna learn about
FOYA and I'm going to learn about appeals and maybe
even sue because the government's telling me, no, you can't
have the documents, and I want the document.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Here's a message to that asshole who worked as the
arkivist on duty at the Reagan Presidential Library in the
year two thousand and four, our fearless for your warrior.
Get the dacks and what would they show? A very
alarming account of what really went down in nineteen eighty three,
(43:21):
spurred by intelligence failures, reckless policies, failed diplomacy, and outright arrogance.
Buckle up, boys and girls. That's going to be a
terrifying ride over the rest of the season. Will spin
a yarn so nuts that it would have Reagan himself
shitting in his ten gallon stetson. We'll tell you how
nineteen eighty three was a truly batshit year for the
(43:44):
human race, complete with fake military invasions, a commercial airliner
full of passengers shot down, and a calculator right out
of a spy movie that might have saved the world.
And all that craziness would set the stage for the
Big Snaffo, a close call with nuclear war that would
be kept top secret for decades. Next week on Snaffoo,
(44:07):
we'll get into the minds of the button pushers themselves,
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Yuri and drop Off,
two men whose provocations in paranoia would push the world
to the brink.
Speaker 10 (44:20):
It did give me a real understanding of the communist menace.
Speaker 9 (44:25):
Ronald Reagan, having campaigned on being top, is not going
to stand up and say.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Oh, that was just for the cameras.
Speaker 9 (44:31):
I'm actually an old softie.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
I love borsh.
Speaker 5 (44:34):
Really, for the first time in my life, I felt
like there could be nuclear.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Warf SNAFU is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment,
and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our
producer is Carl Nellis. Associate producer Tory Smith. It's executive
produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy
(45:01):
Chug and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Sarah Joyner,
with additional writing from me Elliott Kalen, and Whitney Donaldson.
Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis Make the rubble Bouts.
Olivia Kenny is our production assistant. Our creative executive is
Brett Harris. Additional research and fact checking by Charles Richter,
Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Original music and
(45:22):
sound designed by Dan Rosatto. Some archival audio from this
episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic film nineteen eighty three,
The Rink of Apocalypse. Thank you, mister Downing for permission
to use it. Special thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt Aisenstadt.
Host
Ed Helms
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